BANG FOR BUCK: Johnson shows the old hunting knife that saved his life during an attack in an Iraqi home. (
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Of Sgt. Dillard Johnson’s battles, one stands out as particularly blood-tingling. In March 2003, he and his crew faced down Saddam’s army in a sandstorm outside An Najaf. Johnson’s memoir, “Carnivore,” tells how America’s deadliest soldier was nearly killed by an Iraqi in the shadows:
Emerging from the commander’s hatch of my Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Carnivore, I stared out through my goggles and saw hell. A monstrous sandstorm swirled around us, and in the haze the flames from the dozens of destroyed vehicles that had charged our position cast a devilish glow on the terrain.
The sandstorm seemed as if it had been going on forever, like we’d been inside a vortex of dust the entire war, and it was only getting worse. Visibility was down to 10 feet. The glow from the flames was enough to screw up our thermal and night sights, but not sufficiently bright for us to actually see what we needed to, namely the Iraqis we knew were out there.
Crazy Horse Troop, 3/7 Cav, had seen so much action in the first two days of the war that the commander had decided to give us a break. He’d put us in the rear of the column on the march north, guarding the 100 or so thin-skinned vehicles that made up our headquarters and medical and support elements. Those 100 vehicles were stretched out three-quarters of a mile behind me all the way to the bridge we’d crossed over the Euphrates River and made one hell of a tempting target. Especially since we were no longer advancing and had been told to hold both bridges. I was at one end of the convoy in the Carnivore and Sgt. John Williams was at the other, guarding the bridge over the Euphrates in his Bradley, the Casanova.
Capt. Jeff McCoy, the troop commander, had already given us the bad news — in between rare breaks in the sandstorm, JSTAR S, our eye in the sky, had spotted 44 tanks heading toward the rear of our column, right at Sgt. Williams sitting on the Euphrates bridge. If that wasn’t bad enough, they’d then radioed there were 1,000 troop trucks — not troops, mind you, but troop trucks, each one of which could hold at least 20 soldiers — bearing down on our position.
Potentially 20,000 troops. The sporadic trucks we’d seen so far were just the disorganized advance troops, random drops ahead of the oncoming tidal wave. We didn’t have enough ammunition, enough time, enough visibility, and they just kept coming.
Truck after truck kept rolling down the road, and while I’d been on the radio with Capt. McCoy, we had been burning through rounds like they were on sale, but the Iraqis kept coming.
The amount of incoming fire was insane — forget “target-rich environment,” we had more guys in front of us than we had ammo left in the Bradley.
After a night of fighting, I got on the radio and requested another airstrike on the trucks, on the soldiers, on every square inch of dirt in front of the bridge.
Finally, the dawn arrived. The bridge was still there, but beyond it — it was like looking at the moon. The bomb craters were the size of houses. Big houses.
Once again, we were out of ammo. We had none left, as in, if the bombers hadn’t shown up when they did, we were minutes away from having to throw insults at the encroaching Iraqis, maybe some rocks.
I sat down to eat an MRE, then jerked when the radio came to life.
“Red 2, you have hostiles moving in and around a house to your front.”
“Roger that. Watch my move and we’ll go take care of them.” A quick glance around the Brad showed me everybody was out cold.
Wait, when did . . . ? I checked my watch and saw that I had sat down to eat the MRE and fallen asleep for four hours. I didn’t even remember closing my eyes.
We moved through the carnage, collecting rifles and searching for Iraqi troops.
“Dismounts left!” I yelled out. Three soldiers ran into the house closest to the bridge. Gunner Michael Soprano slewed the turret around and put 10 rounds of 25 mm high explosive into it. The front of the brick house blew apart, but there was no way to know if we’d gotten the soldiers.
As we approached the house on foot, Michael “Sully” Sullivan in the lead, an Iraqi ran out of the ragged hole the HE had blasted in the front wall of the house. Soprano shot him in the face with my pistol. Very carefully we entered the front of the house and found the bodies of the other two Iraqis.
“All right, check the back of the house,” I told my guys. “I’m going to check these bastards for documents.”
The first Iraqi had an M1911 .45 pistol on him. God only knows where he got it, and the path it took from the United States to end up in his hands had probably been long and interesting. I laid down my AK and picked up the .45 to see if it was loaded — it was. As I was checking it out to see if there were any US Army markings on it, another Iraqi with an AK stepped out from behind a pile of wood just feet from me.
“S–t!” I pointed the pistol at his chest, pulled the trigger, the hammer fell — and nothing happened. Just a click.
We looked at each other for a fraction of a second, then I lunged at him and with a roar hit him in the face with the pistol. He dropped his AK as I dropped the 1911.
I went for the Buck hunting knife I’d carried while turkey and deer hunting in Kentucky and all through Desert Storm. As he grappled with me I stabbed him under the arm and tried to stab him again — but I couldn’t get the knife out.
I don’t know if his chest muscles clamped down on the blade of the knife or what, but I couldn’t pull it out of him, and he kept fighting and fighting. He took forever to die, or maybe it just seemed like forever.
In the movies, people who get stabbed just fall over and die. In the real world, it takes a long time to bleed out. He didn’t go quickly or quietly.
As I watched him die, I thought how stupid he was, how stupid I was. He could have surrendered, but instead he’d died. For what? Saddam and his torture chambers? And my lack of sleep had me making mistakes that probably should have killed me.
From “Carnivore: A Memoir by One of the Deadliest American Soldiers of All Time” by Dillard Johnson and James Tarr. Copyright © 2013 by Dillard Johnson and James Tarr. To be published Tuesday by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.